Sunday, June 12, 2005

Downing Street Memo #2 Sensibility Slap..."Significant Plans"

For a change, the White House is quickly responding to another British memo leaked to the London Times, this one on July 12, 2005 This article has recieved attention from the Washington Post and mainly talked about the lack of planning for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion by the Bush administration.

In the Reuters article the Bush admininistration resonded quickly saying that "Some things we prepared for did not happen, like large numbers of refugees needing humanitarian assistance," Almacy said. "And others we did not expect, such as large numbers of regime elements fleeing the battlefield only to return later."

According to available reports, humaniterian aid is desperately needed, disease is spreading at tremendous rates especially among children (such as typhoid and cholera) from lack of sanitation, $8 billion just DISAPPEARED under Paul Bremer's nose because nobody was practicing accounting responsibility, weapons and parts for making chemical weapons and bombs were looted from various sites while Iraq was under total US control...this does not sound like planning, significant or not.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Sunday there was "significant" postwar planning for Iraq and disputed the characterization of a memo produced for British Prime Minister Tony Blair eight months before the invasion that expressed concerns about a long occupation.

The briefing paper concluded that the U.S. military was not preparing adequately for what the memo predicted would be a "protracted and costly" postwar occupation of Iraq, The Washington Post reported in Sunday's editions.

"We disagree with the characterization. There was significant postwar planning," David Almacy, a White House spokesman, said.

"More importantly, the memo in question was written eight months before the war began -- there was significant postwar planning in the time that elapsed," he said.

What is strange here, though, is that there is no denial that plans to invade Iraq were being developed as early as July 2002 while we were being told that there was no plans for military action. LYING TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE.

The latest British memo states that that since regime change was illegal it was “necessary to create the conditions” which would make it legal....there was also no denial of this.

Together with the Downing Street Memo, both documents (that have been confirmed as authentic by the Washington Post) state that the justifications for the Iraq invasion were manufactured.

Of course, we have had a couple of people trying to take us all for imbiciles by saying the meaning of some statements are different in the British English translation. I hate to burst the Far Right bubble here but in Britain if you fix the facts around policy you will get the same reaction as you would in the US because the meaning is the same over there.

A coalition of veterans' groups, peace groups, and political activist groups announced a campaign today to urge that the U.S. Congress launch a formal investigation into whether President Bush has committed impeachable offenses in connection with the Iraq war. The campaign focuses on evidence that recently emerged in a British memo containing minutes of a secret July 2002 meeting with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and his top national security officials.